Wilson Sayre

Wilson Sayre was born and bred in Raleigh, N.C., home of the only real barbecue in the country (we're talking East here). She graduated from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, where she studied Philosophy.

Sayre took a year off school to live in a Zen monastery in Japan and quickly realized that a life of public radio would be a bit more forgiving. Upon returning to the States, she helped launch a news program at UNC’s college-radio station, WXYC. Through error and error, she taught herself how to make radio stories.

She worked with NPR member station WUNC in Chapel Hill, interning for The Story with Dick Gordon. Then she went on to help to run WUNC's Youth Radio Institute, teaching at-risk teenagers how to make radio.

Sayre likes to keep chickens, pickle okra and make sound collages.

Sayre initially came down to WLRN in 2013 for a reporting fellowship. After that, she decided she couldn't leave. She's continued her a mission to get more Miamians to wear overalls and say y'all.

In Florida, 15 percent of families don’t know where they’re going to get their next meal. When you look at children alone, that number increases to almost a quarter who are food insecure, according to Feeding America, one of the largest networks of food banks in the country.

Update 11/20 - The U.S. Department of Agriculture has approved Florida to conduct telephone interviews for individuals who pre-registered for DSNAP who also have a disability or who are over the age of 60. The lawsuit is continuing to push for registration possibilities for people who do not meet that criteria.

After Hurricane Irma, the federal government offered a food assistance program to Floridians who needed help because of the storm. The signup period for that program ended last week.

But there’s an ongoing lawsuit that might reopen registration for some people with disabilities because, the suit claims, the lines to sign up were prohibitively long.

Instead of opting for a few final words as he is strapped to a gurney in the death chamber, Florida Death Row inmate Mike Lambrix decided to speak his mind during an hour-long group interview Tuesday, two days before his scheduled execution.

Miami police intends to involuntarily commit homeless individuals starting Friday if they refuse to move off the streets. Volunteer outreach teams through the Miami-Dade County Homeless Trust began placing individuals in shelters Tuesday morning and will continue those efforts through Thursday.

He was next in line to be executed when a U.S. Supreme Court decision threw Florida's death penalty into limbo. He was one of two Death Row inmates who had active death warrants for a year and a half. Mark Asay, the other inmate, was executed on Aug. 24, breaking the hiatus.

While the state of Florida is set to execute the first person in more than a year and a half, 150 other Death Row inmates await new sentences.

The death penalty was put on hold in the state after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the landmark case of Hurst v. Florida that the process applied for sentencing someone to death was unconstitutional.

On May 19, Fort Lauderdale police officers and city workers showed up without notice at Stranahan Park with dozens of blue trash bins, a front-end loader and a dump truck. They ordered all the homeless living there to put their stuff in the bins; the rest of the stuff was scooped up by the loader and thrown in the dump truck.

Click here to listen to the sounds of the rally that kicked off the strike in this audio version of the story.

More than 100 workers at Miami International Airport are striking for 24 hours.

Subcontractors tasked with handling baggage, curbside check-in and pushing wheelchairs for various airlines are walking off the job in protest of what they say are violations of the Miami-Dade County living-wage ordinance.

Javier Vivo helps carry passengers’ bags and pushes wheelchairs at Miami International airport’s J Terminal, welcoming international travelers to the area. When he was hired as a part time employee, he wasn’t given a choice whether to take his company’s health insurance or not. It was take it or leave the job. When Vivo tried to use his insurance at the emergency room to take care of a stomach issue, though, he found out the insurance card did not give him access to much of an insurance plan.

A bill (HB 23) that’s slated to be heard by the full state House of Representatives would increase the penalties if people fail to meet those requirements. A now-competing bill in the state Senate would strike these penalties.

Florida keeps inching closer to having a working death penalty in the state.

This week, the Senate Criminal Justice Committee overwhelmingly approved a measure that would now require a unanimous jury to sentence someone to death. The House Criminal Justice Subcommittee is slated to hear a similar bill on Feb. 15.

After a year of turmoil for the state’s death penalty, one Florida legislator is trying to rein things in a bit. House Judiciary Chairman Chris Sprowls has proposed a bill that would bring the state’s death penalty in line with several state court and U.S. Supreme Court decisions that have thrown the sentence into limbo.

A new bill under consideration by the Florida Legislature would make it easier for defendants to use the "Stand Your Ground" defense when faced with use of force charges.

For years, Florida laws have had provisions for self-defense immunity, protecting people who use force in self-defense from being prosecuted. There are certain restrictions on where and when you are justified in using various kind of force in self-defense.

Gov. Rick Scott signed into law a new pathway to sentence someone to death Monday. These changes came nearly two months after the U.S. Supreme Court took issue with Florida’s old system for handing down the sentence in the Hurst v. Florida case.